Should a quadrotor’s airframe and controller gains be searched jointly when the plant is uncertain?
research/codesign-aero-joint
Should airframe and gains be searched jointly under an uncertain plant? Yes in this stylised model: joint CMA-ES at 960 evaluations (5.75° median held-out, 8 seeds) beats random search and a 4800-evaluation grid-then-tune best cell (6.00°).
What it found
Follow-up to codesign-aero-robust: joint CMA-ES over arm length, prop diameter and three roll gains, trained on the wide randomised plant, against uniform random search at equal budget and against grid-then-tune. On held-out episodes the median CMA-ES winner reaches 5.75° at 960 evaluations (8 seeds, 5.70–5.87°) and 5.74° at 4800, random search 6.17° and 5.96°, and the grid’s best cell (4800 evaluations, picked on the held-out set) 6.00°. Stylised: assumed constants and ranges, roll axis only, five parameters, coarse grid reference.
A figure from its own output
Paper, code and results
More in Agentic co-design of low-cost robots
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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.